(Before final editing prior to release under standard U.S. Government for-fee licensing under the 2011 Fee Requirements Law)

My fellow Americans,

There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary.

The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn’t passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today.

RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.

There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.Read the rest of this entry »

This leaves the homeless people who have to dig through garbage for their survival unable to use these clothes. Just down the street from that store is a collection point for a charity group that distributes clothing to the poor. These people at H & M have got to be the most massive assholes ever born.

They refused to talk to the reporter before that story was filed. Now that it’s published, I bet they’ll release a statement soon to the effect that “we do this to prevent someone else from picking them out of the trash and selling them.”

Even if that is true – and it sounds perfectly plausible – it still doesn’t change the fact that the people at H & M are massive, fucking assholes.

I’ll concede that they have no obligation to donate their unsold merchandise to charity – although that would be right thing to do. Whatever – I’ll concede the point. But these assholes go to the extra effort and expense to destroy the clothing before discarding them.

If these douchebags are willing to pay someone to sit there with a box cutter (or scissors or *whatever*) cutting up perfectly wearable clothing, they can pay that same person to dump the clothes into a wheelbarrow and wheel it down to the clothing collection site.

Or even just throw them out intact, which would require LESS effort than what they do now.

H & M is on my shitlist now. That company is managed by world-class assholes and I will never spend so much as a penny in one of their stores.

Update:
Yeah, that figures. I’m two days late writing about this. They’ve already been shamed into halting this despicable activity. (h/t to Faerie Kat)

Damage control in the face of overwhelmingly bad publicity doesn’t excuse the fact that it happened in the first place and they are still douchebags, but at least they’re going to stop doing this. And I’m still not going to shop there.